That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves).
For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun).
It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。
I think it's obvious from the context that he means "worst" from a macro perspective. I don't really see why it bugs you so much -- the fact that any given person likely prefer a "kind" slaveowner, or prefer that the rich be charitable seems to go without saying.
That's not quite true. I feel like you missed the whole point. The audience is their contemporaries. "Good" slave owners gave an excuse to their contemporaries to allow slavery to exist. If other people only saw "bad" slabs owners his argument is slavery would've ended sooner️.
>those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students
That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst?
Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
Why should we care about a future sociologist's or historian's opinion about what was "worst"?
It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.
We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?
The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are.
Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.
>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?
Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have.
I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable.
Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse.
Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.
I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them.
The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.
The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.
How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.
I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.
I do not consciously support slavery. I just find some objection to the apparent false dichotomy that beating slaves is a sound path to their freedom.
If (and it's a very big if), the only way to end slavery is to have slaves be beaten, then you might have a good point. However, I can think of no way to verify that, nor can I think of any evidence in support of that premise that can withstand even most most basic scrutiny.
>How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people?
Would you allow yourself to be beaten if it meant your children could be free? Or would you rather let your children be slaves and neither of you be beaten?
This isn't just about slavery: it could apply to any war-like situation. But if you aren't being beaten as a slave, how are you resisting slavery? Your owner just lets you get away with not doing what you're told?
Because I really don't see how not resisting is supposed to end slavery, and I don't see how avoiding beatings is any kind of resistance.
Surely there are other ways to resist slavery than being beaten?
If there were some highly effective and rapid communication system, for example, the slaves could possibly organize and GTFO before their owners had any way to stop them. Yes, there's the chance that it could turn bloody, but I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully (as far as one can imagine such a hypothetical).
Even if such a thing were possible, it seems highly unlikely that a bunch of slaves could pull it off successfully. How's a slave going to gain access to a high-speed communication network in a way that doesn't immediately prompt retribution?
Slaves are either compliant or tortured for not being compliant. That's why slavery is so brutal; if your owner doesn't beat you, he'll either kill you or sell you to someone who will. There's really no other option for dealing with a slave who refuses to obey. (And I don't see how a compliant slave can help end slavery.)
> I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully
How? People who legally own slaves aren't going to just let their slaves walk away anymore than any company now is going to let their employees walk away with all their profits.
I don't think that's a useful hypothetical. If I were born into slavery, I would be a different person, and I can't tell you what that person would think.
I was telling you what I actually do think, not what someone else might think. That is, knowing what I know now, I would say what I said. If you are asking me if I would agree with that while not knowing what I know now, then obviously I can't say, because I would know things that I don't currently know.
Regardless, I can't make decisions using information I don't have, so the question is pointless.
> he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian.
Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that.
But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said.
But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.
His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."
If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
I don't understand your question. The long term value I'm talking about is that of the system being gone, so it being gone is a realization of that value, not a point that the value isn't there.
That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank."
>If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad.
But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (the source of the quote, if anyone's curious) gave me the distinct impression that Wilde enjoyed bugging the shit out of people. Who would have guessed?
For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun).
It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。